~ Thinking outside the box about Cambodia

Declaration of assets

You may need to clean your reading glasses and open big eyes to be sure that the news as reported via this link is true, accurate and reliable!

Are you ready for the first sentence of the reported article: “Cambodia’s Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) announced Wednesday that 70 percent or 10,683 of the leaders and senior officials had already declared their assets for the third time.”

You may now need to take a very deep breath, sit up in lotus position and pray to heaven to spray holy water on the whole population of Cambodians minus those 10,683!

Let us take the news at its face value, and raise the following questions among ourselves for the sake of a better understanding of what belies underneath or between the lines:

– Will ACU have the courage, the integrity and the national pride to publish the entire list without redacting it? or will ACU be allowed by the mighty power that is to let the public have an opinion on the true contents of the list?

– What will ACU do with the list? Will it have the legal, human, intellectual, investigative and technical resources and ability to review those declarations?

– Does ACU report on itself?

– Against what standard ACU will measure the value, fictitious or otherwise, of each declaration?

– Does ACU have the authority or the will to comprehensively audit each declaration?

– Does ACU know the difference between assets and income? or in other words, does ACU know that there is a relationship between income and assets?

– Does ACU have the authority or the capability to assess the true existence and value of the assets? or does it have the authority or the capability to detect and to go after the hidden assets?

– Did ACU expose and publish the corruption cases that it investigated in the past?

– Or the whole enchilada is just an exercise of window dressing or deception to temporarily appease the public wrath against the wholesale corruption throughout the country?

– What does the NA and its specialized commission do with this news? Hullo, are you there? Is there anybody home to answer the door?

Kacvey, if you run into ACU officials, please tell them to google “New York State Assembly Speaker”, and see how they react.

Anti-corruption is a good weapon to fight corruption if it is not corrupted itself or by corrupted power.